Hey y'all. I'm new to duck hunting this season and found a decent spot where I've seen ducks land and work. The body of water is a good sized area with beavers dams and timber all thru it. The only thing is it's mostly covered in lily pads. I have a few questions. WIll the lily pads affect how the ducks land on the water? and also, will this affect how my decoy spread should look? Thanks in advance.

if you are hunting mostly local birds they are going to be a pain... lilies tangled on ur lines and retrieving ducks are a pain at the spot we hunt loaded with lilies because you sink knee deep in the mud. but once the push starts and it starts to get cold youll see all the lilies are gone and they wont be an issue at all

I hunt the exact type of habitat and they will die off.But i also try to keep them killed off the best i can bc a duck wont land on the lily pads they will land outside of them and swim around/in them from wut ive seen.if there not where you wont them to land you should be ok

X2 on what's said above, both about pads being a pain and that they will die off when it gets cool. How deep is the spot? If you're wading in it, I'd bring a rake and use the pads to your advantage while they're still there. Push the pads to spots where you don't want birds landing and leave yourself a nice hole. If the spot isn't really big enough for that, you can drag the pads out onto the bank and they'll die there.

I hunt lilies that last all early season and part of middle season i actually like them because it forces the birds into certain holes a mojo is good early season the lilys root system makes the walking easy but if i step off the lilys i sink into bout 2 feet of mud. that ol tale of ducks swimin under the water and grabbing ahold of something to keep them hidden underthe water is true. i shot one and it dove under the lilies i markd him really well i found him because a lily was movin when i pulled him out from underthe wayer he had part of the lily in his mouth.

renegadeduck wrote:I hunt lilies that last all early season and part of middle season i actually like them because it forces the birds into certain holes a mojo is good early season the lilys root system makes the walking easy but if i step off the lilys i sink into bout 2 feet of mud. that ol tale of ducks swimin under the water and grabbing ahold of something to keep them hidden underthe water is true. i shot one and it dove under the lilies i markd him really well i found him because a lily was movin when i pulled him out from underthe wayer he had part of the lily in his mouth.

this is true. I've lost more crips hunting lilies than any other vegetation. Like stated above: mark them well

renegadeduck wrote: that ol tale of ducks swimin under the water and grabbing ahold of something to keep them hidden underthe water is true. i shot one and it dove under the lilies i markd him really well i found him because a lily was movin when i pulled him out from underthe wayer he had part of the lily in his mouth.

When I was in high school we had a blind on an AFB lake that was covered in massive rafts of hydrilla. We kept a nice wooded hole pretty open with the hydrilla to all sides and every cripple we shot would head straight for the rafts. If you had a good mark you could run a paddle down and knock them free, but we lost our fair share. It was pretty common to find dead birds from the weekend before that had been busted loose by engine props or just shook loose. It also made previously productive parts of the lake impassible.

Interestingly enough, they introduced a chemical one of the last years we hunted there that killed off all the hydrilla...and when the hydrilla went away so did the ducks. I would assume that the hydrilla was supporting quite a bit of invertebrates that the ducks were feeding off of. Too bad too, you could sit and watch the grays by the thousands coming off the roost to feed every morning and we had some great hunts out there.

One thing good about lily pads is what they look like from way up in the air, after they die down a little. They look just like ducks if your up in the air a few hundred yards. Where I live there are not a lot of places with lily pads but I used to hunt close to a pond with lily's and the mallards sure liked that pond. I also hunt a public lake that had a lot of lily's and the state killed them all off and we don't kill 25% of the ducks we used to. We used to bring in birds from way up and I know it was because it looked like the lake was covered in ducks.